Excerpt from letter written by Peter O'Donnell to
one of the list members:
"In 1962, when I first began to create them, it was quite reasonable for
Modesty to have been a war refugee from somewhere in the Balkans.
Thirty-plus years on, it doesn't fit. I can't say that this has worried me,
but about fifteen years ago I thought I would try to work out what origins
I would give Modesty if I had been devising her then, in 1980
instead of 1962. Obviously this was just for my own
satisfaction, as there's no way her past can be rewritten now, so
this isn't for general publication but if you thought it might
interest your internet friends then you're free to pass it on.
I'm sending a copy with this letter."
signed
Peter O'Donnell
How it could have been...
Written by Peter O'Donnell
A well-to-do Hungarian, with his wife and eight-year-old
daughter, fled their country penniless in the mid-seventies to
escape arrest for political crimes. In the mountains of
Transylvania, trying to reach Turkey by remote ways, the parents
were attacked by a pair of mentally deficient peasants who had
been banished from their village -- a small, isolated and
incestuous community. The peasants claimed that these strangers
were vampires, and slaughtered them in horrible fashion.
The child escaped, but shock at what she had seen brought total
amnesia. She had no memory of her past, her parents, her name --
anything. She was simply a small living organism trying to
survive. And survive she did, living on whatever she could find
or beg or steal, becoming more adept as the months and years
passed, and moving ever south, always keeping clear of towns,
running from trouble when she could, fighting like a wild-cat if
cornered; her weapon, one she had fashioned herself by binding a
long nail with wire to a handle of wood. After four years the
child-with-no-name was an experienced survivor. In that time she
crossed Turkey and Syria, and spent more than a year with a tribe
of nomads, working as a goat-herd. But at twelve, and soon to be
regarded as a woman, she knew she would have to wear the Moslem
veil, and so she moved on and came at last to a camp for
Displaced Persons. It was here that she fell in with a small,
gentle old man who had once been a professor in Budapest until,
like her parents, he had been forced to flee from political
persecution.
He called himself Lob, and the child loved him for his gentle-
ness. She took to protecting him with snarling ferocity if
others tried to rob him of his meagre food ration, and thus a
strange friendship was begun. After a while they left the squalor
of the camp together. She stole a donkey to carry their few
belongings, and in the years that followed they roamed for
thousands of miles around the Middle East and along the whole
North African coast.
By now the child no longer feared towns and cities, where good
pickings were to be found, and soon their belongings included
books and paper and the tools of education, for Lob knew
everything in the world and the child was desperate to learn. It
was Lob who with a chuckle gave her the name "Modesty". She
chose "Blaise" for herself, after Lob had told her the legend of
King Arthur and his magician, Merlin, whose tutor had been called
Blaise.
Lob spoke five languages, and over the years of their wanderings
he taught them all to her, insisting that they spoke a different
language each day. Towards the end of this time, perhaps in her
sixteenth year, Modesty developed a fierce ambition to make a
home for Lob and herself. One day in Marrakesh she decided that
Tangier was a place where it was possible to grow rich quickly,
and so they set out on the four hundred mile trek. But fifty
miles from Tangier, Lob quietly died. She buried him there in
the desert, and wept for the first time in her memory. Then she
walked on to Tangier alone.
Her story from this time on until she wound up The Network, is
touched on briefly throughout the novels.